“Just keep cruising, Matchic,” Stenn said as he climbed into the back. “I got a couple of questions. About the blonde at the station three-four days ago.”
Kevan laughed. “The day Matchic was grass colored, eh?”
“Shut up,” Matchic growled.
“I want to know about those two witnesses. The little fat guy give you trouble?”
“Sure,” Kevan said. “He didn’t want any part of it. He was groaning about his bad heart. Somebody pointed him out sitting in the train reading his paper like nothing had happened. He tried to say he wasn’t anywhere near the girl when she went over the edge. But two people saw him there and told me and I pressured the name and address out of him, then checked it against his papers.”
“How about the Clove girl?”
“That was something else again. She insisted on being a witness. I thought she was a phony like a lot of that kind are. But we checked and found she was really right near the blonde.”
“Notice anything else about her?”
“Outside of acting a little goofy, no.”
“Goofy in what way besides wanting her name taken down?”
“Well, while the doc was under the train putting the tourniquets on the blonde, the Clove gal was on her hands and knees right beside me. I expected her to faint because it wasn’t very pretty under there. I looked over at her and she looked like somebody watching the waiter bring a steak dinner. When a female is bloodthirsty she gets under my skin. I had to shove her away.”
“Thanks. You can drop me off on the next corner. See you around.”
Chapter Three
Money Makes Murder
It took Stenn until eleven o’clock to locate the Theater of the Dance. He had thought that he could locate any organization in the city in half that time. It was at the end of a narrow alley that turned off Proctor Street in the oldest part of the city. Stenn vaguely remembered that the building, set squarely across the end of the alley, had at one time figured as a warehouse for a certain bootlegging combine. Proctor Street near the alley mouth was a place of horse rooms, dusty candy stores and several dance studies and Turkish bath outfits.
The place was dark. There was a heavy wire grill across the top half of the sturdy door. Stenn turned his pencil flash through the dusty glass, saw a table littered with papers, the end of a cot. He tried the door. It was locked. He took the folded newspaper out of his pocket, spread it on the ground, sat on it and began to wait with all the stubborn, endless, frightening patience at his command.
It was close to one o’clock when two couples came down the alley past the trash cans. They were talking loudly, laughing, silhouetted against the lights of Proctor Street.
Stenn silenced them by rising to his feet as they approached.
“Sleep it off some place else,” a man said. They stood, wary, staring at him.
Stenn flicked on his light, swept it across their faces, holding it for a fraction of a second on each one. Two girls, both blonde, both very young but with the threat of future hardness in their faces. One vast blonde young man with bovine good looks and a pink buttonhole mouth. One dark man, a bit older, his face alert and vital.
“What do you want?” the dark one said as the light touched his face.
“I’m looking for Della Clove.”
“Why?”
He held the badge briefly in the white glare of the light. “That’s why.”
“You won’t find her here. She lives outside the city,” one of the girls said. “Which might be considered a very good thing.” She laughed, too loudly.
“Shut your face,” the dark man said. Stenn detected a faint accent.
“Are you Raoul?” Stenn asked.
“Yes. I have no business with you.”
“I can decide that, one way or another. Open up. We’ll go inside.”
“You have a warrant, Officer?”
“No. It’s your choice. Talk here or talk in my office.”
“What’s the charge?”
Stenn turned the light again on the younger of the two girls. “How old are you, honey?”
“Twenty-one,” she said, with a knowing curl to her lip.
“And I think I could prove sixteen. That would make it a morals charge, Raoul. Now will you play?”
The laughter had gone out of them. Raoul pushed by Stenn and opened the door with a key. He reached inside and clicked on the light. It was an unshaded bulb that hung between cot and table. There were two dirty paper plates on the floor, a container that had evidently held coffee.
Raoul said, his tone determinedly gay, “Sorry the place is in such a mess, Officer. We weren’t expecting distinguished company. This is the old watchman’s room. Now it’s my bedroom. When we open up it will become the ticket office. Here, I’ll show you the rest of the layout.” He walked through the far door and clicked a switch. A dim light disclosed a large room with a stage at the far end. Wooden chairs had been lined up to give it the look of a theater.
“My name,” he said, “is Raoul Palma. This is a school of the drama. I am licensed to teach here. I have been in this city for a year. My three friends are members of the cast in a play that is now in rehearsal. We have worked this evening. We went out to eat. We have returned to work again. Are there any more questions?”
Stenn turned and looked at the other three. The big man’s face wore a permanent simper. The two girls gave him stony looks. “Go on in and work then, while I talk with Palma.”
They filed by him. Palma sat on the cot. Stenn pulled the connecting door shut. He looked long and hard at Palma. The man’s face was intelligent, sensitive. His fingers were long and delicate, but he appeared to be well muscled.
“Something about this layout smells,” Stenn said.
“Is art criticism your strong point, old man?”
The tone was as cool and insolent as any Stenn had ever heard. He tightened his right fist a bit. “How many people will be in your play? What will it be called?”
“The three in there, Della Clove and myself. A cast of five. It will be called ‘Etude in Three Acts.’ It depicts decadence. We will be ready to put it on two months from now. I call the medium we are using interpretive ballet. I have a one-year lease on this building. The Theater of the Dance is organized as a charitable and educational institution.”
“Do you have a job?”
“This,” said Palma, with an inclusive sweep of his hand, “is my career.”
“What do you live on?”
Palma’s eyes were touched with arrogance. “Miss Clove, out of the goodness of her heart, feels that this venture is worth supporting. With the help of that portion of her small income which she donates, we manage to get along. Not luxuriously, as you can see, but adequately.”
“Put it another way, Palma. Call it a form of extortion.”
“Hardly that. Miss Clove and I are to be married once the play starts. We plan on a long, successful run.”
“Does she know that?”
“Of course. Now is there anything else?”
“I’ll be back to see her. She’ll be here tomorrow afternoon?”
Raoul Palma held the door open. He bowed with irony. “So nice you called, sir. I’ll tell Della she had a visitor.”
Stenn frowned his way down the alley and out onto the Proctor Street sidewalk. Raoul Palma had handled him neatly, competently. Almost too well. It spoke of past contact with law. Raoul was a man practising a form of dishonesty that was neatly within the letter of the law and he knew it. Stenn guessed his age at about forty, a very compact, capable forty.
He found Al Morganson getting ready to leave the news room. They went together to Al’s favorite bar, the Rip Tide, which belied its bold name by being small, dim, dusty. There were only forty-five minutes left until closing. Morganson was one of those rare men so colorless that he seemed to have no specific contour of face or body. To a very few people in the world Al Morganson betrayed his capacity for affection. Paul Stenn was one of these. To all the rest of humanity Morganson was as coldly emotionless, as calculatingly exact, as a key-punch machine.